Music duo Sofi Tukker (Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern) are on tour in support of their new album “Treehouse” where we caught their headline date on a tour that also includes many festival dates. We got to chat with designer Tess Falcone who came to design the tour, saying she was contacted prior to the tour by Ali Pike. “Ali, LD extraordinaire of the likes of LCD Soundsystem and Kylie Minogue reached out to me before the tour. I had worked previously with Sofi Tukker’s guitarist Josh Hoisington, so it was easy to come into a somewhat familiar camp.”

Falcone says she had seen the band perform once but was unfamiliar with the music. “The design needed to turn around really quickly so I worked with Sophie and Tucker to find a design concept we liked and ran with it. I was supposed to have a bit more programming time than what I ended up with because I broke my arm a few days before I was scheduled for prepro and had to go into surgery. In the end, I had two days at Brown Note Productions’ awesome previz space (with a 3D rig that Joe Casper set up for me), plus a day and a half of rehearsals before going straight into the first show.”

Brown Note is the tour lighting vendor. Falcone notes that some of her closest friends in production come from Brown Note. “I had not used them as a tour vendor but I had used them on various other shows in the Denver area. The rig was really well prepped and they took very good care of myself and Dora (Gaskill) who took over road LD duties for me when I had to move onto another band tour design.”

Dora Gaskill was working with the band’s Tour/Production manager Heather Ryan for the artist MØ, and Heather could not speak highly enough about her, say’s Falcone. “Dora was excited to take on the challenge and does a fantastic job directing the tour. She is also just a delight to work with. The Sofi Tukker team was so kind and patient with me when I became a one-armed programmer, and Brown Note really stepped up to make my life as easy as possible. A friend of mine also did a decent amount of manual labor to create some of the set pieces for me. I am lucky to have gotten to work on such a cool project with such wonderful people.”

The tour visited the Fox Theater in Oakland, CA on May 18. More tour photos by Steve Jennings: